Thread by @homemadeguitars

I'm going to write a bit tonight about indigenaety, or indigenous-ness, or whatever the proper term is for what is. These are thoughts. They are sort of opinions, but when I write like this I am thinking things through, so none of this thinking is set in stone.

2. When people in the world I inhabit use the term indigenous, they mean the first peoples who lived here in the Americas, or in Australia, and possibly subSaharan Africa. The people here when the white colonizers got here.

3. As pretty much everyone knows, that term encompasses a vast number of different societies, ways of organizing human community life, spread out over vast time and space. Hot places, cold places, wet places, dry places, and always, Earth came first, people adapted and thrived.

4. To take a simple illustration, there was no way the Plains People could have evolved cultures like those of the Missourians, who lived in fertile savanna, nor the Seminole in the Everglades and Florida. Earth came first and defined its humans. Joint effort.

5. Probably the harshest clime ever occupied by humans was the very southern tip of South America, the Yahgan, canoe nomads who lived naked because the climate wouldn't permit clothes. The Uttermost Part of the Earth.
We killed them, of course. Measles took the very last one.

6. There is a Land Back movement. After some thought, I do not support it.
As regular readers know, I support a total conversion from modern life to localized indigenaety at every place on Earth, that we heal her and save our miserable hides from climate change and it's kinfolk.

7. I think it's about as likely in real life as Land Back, which is to say, not very, but I dream things and write them down.
Wes Jackson, one of the two voices I was listening to when I departed on this road (the other, Wendell Berry) Wes wrote "Becoming Indigenous to this Plac

8. That's "Place". I ran out of characters.
I made a conscious decision, in my 30s, to become indigenous to Missouri. I chose Missouri because that's where I was born. I took this biome as physically part of me, me of it.
I ate this dirt at 4.
Not right here, but close.

9. This has been an unceasing educational process. If I had children and they stayed here for a thousand generations we'd be the kind of Indigenous-ness that once existed, but is nearly gone.

10. I've never done my DNA and hope never to be forced to, and I don't know my genealogy, but by my name, McFadden, I'll tell you the long history back to Indigenous.

11. Sometime a long time ago, nobody knows how long, my DNA came to the island we call Britain, and settled probably in the northern highlands. They lived lives not terribly different from the Missourians who lived here at the time, largely settled, agriculture, wildlife, gather.

12. They were there for sure by the Bronze Age, in Old World terms.
The Bronze Age and the Iron Age never came here. Just didn't, so the terms and the trajectories are different.
Iron tools are high energy technology. Bronze too.
Native Americans stayed on local energy. Better?

13. Maybe. I'm not sure.
Rome conquered the Island and controlled much of it, but it does not appear that they ever colonized my family's part. We were Celts, Scots. We were Indigenous.
Then the Romans left. In 1099 Normans, from Normandy, which later would become France, came.

14. The Normans conquered most of the island, but we were able to hold them off in the highlands. Eventually, though, they beat us. They deported my family name to Ireland, which is where the Mac became Mc. Stuck us in the north of Ireland.
We were Protestants.

15. And that fight still goes on, from time to time. I find it strange that the conquered former Scots who make up Northern Ireland wound up allied with the English who deported them. Stockholm Syndrome or something.
This isn't exactly the history, it's just the story. But.

16. So here I am. In Missouri. And the problem with Land Back, is - I can't get back to mine. It's out of reach. It was taken by colonizers seven or eight hundred years ago, I don't even know. But - I've got no place to go. I can't give it back.
And the people who were here -

17. They're all as dead as my Scots ancestors. What was done to them was horrible, and the reasons for doing it were horrible. And the result of all that killing and inventing is 2021. Climate change. Mass extinction. Mass murder. Amazon employees. It's all one thing.

18. We need to become indigenous to our planet. To the extent the children of the people here when the colonizers came still have knowledge of these places, we should go to them with our hats in our hands and say, Please teach me.
But what they had, we already killed that. So 🤷

19. We should go to the Amish and say, Please teach me. We should go to the animal powered farmers of the energy efficient world and say, Please teach me.
You cannot become indigenous to a place at a mile a minute over its dead paved back.

20. If we became Indigenous to these places, we would not worry about Jobs with a capital J. Earth needs more from us than all of us put together could do in one lifetime.
Indigenous people eat from their homes and are filled. They grow tall and live long. They walk with life.

21. Should we choose to, we could restore the glories that were here when the colonizers got here, we could restore Earth based communities, societies, cultures, trade networks. We could walk, ride animals with their consent, and watch more beauty than all the televisions on 🌎

22. But you can't do it by yourself.
We're herd creatures.
Right now the herd is flowing a mile a minute over the paved surface of a bleeding Earth.
Most of the Indigenous people in this country are right there with the flow.
Not their fault. So am I, too often. Today.

23. To be a climate activist, mostly, is to try to find ways to continue to brutalize and ignore our dying home planet but do it without emitting CO2.
I reject that solution as, if nothing else, morally indefensible. Who gave us the right to kill all this?
Become indigenous.

24. If we put our roots down as proud members of the web of life, anywhere on Earth we might live, and became individually, tribally, communally Indigenous to those places, by the time our children were old they would be wiser than we have ever imagined.
And climate change 🛑🚫🏞️